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This section was my workspace for philosophy essays between July 2006 and April 2008.
I call this "Prehistoric Kilroy" because it gave me practice for more
disciplined essays in Kilroy Cafe.Also see my philophical blog and Twitter feed.

Issue #58, 12/31/2006

Self-Regulation

By Glenn CampbellFamily Court Philosopher

If there is an important decision to be made about your
life, you are the best person to make it. No one knows
better than you what you can and cannot do, and no one has
better information about your body and feelings. The advice
of others is useful up to a point, but no one but you is
better equipped to steer your own ship.

This is an obvious observation but also terribly difficult
to learn. Gaining competent self-regulation is the primary
conflict of childhood and especially adolescence. In the
beginning, our parents regulate nearly everything for us.
In the end, we are supposed to be regulating ourselves. The
transition in-between can be terribly painful and, in fact,
may never end even in adulthood.

Take the simple matter of dressing yourself. In the
beginning, your parents dressed you. They may have done an
adequate job, but they didn't have much sense for your real
comfort. To be dressed comfortably and properly for the
environment, you have to do it yourself, because only you
have access to all the relevant systems information.

It is a wonder that babies survive at all! It is not they
they are abandoned to the elements. What you see more often
is parents who overcompensate, wrapping their babies up like
mummies even on warm days. The baby is nearly helpless in
this situation. He can issue an ambiguous cry, but many
parents are insensitive about what it means. Understanding
whether the baby is hot or cold takes not only sensitivity
to the baby but also a grasp of heat-transfer physics. The
baby, however, has plenty of information on his inner state,
without the physics; he just can't translate it into
actions in the real world.

"Put on a jacket or you'll catch your death of cold," Mom may
tell you later. This is very simplistic advice, and
you often ignore it. You have learned intuitively that when
you are active, you generate more internal heat and may not
need a jacket. Mom has no way of sensing this, since she
isn't as close to the situation as you are, so she gives you
the standard off-the-shelf advice.

Later in the day, when you are not running around, you may
start shivering and may regret not listening to Mom. In any
event, personal heat regulation turns out to be more
complicated than the standard advice. To be comfortable, you
have to be sensitive to your own inner sensations and learn
some basic science about what makes you feel good. For the
most part, these are things you have to learn on your own,
often through bitter experience. To know when to wear a
jacket, you have to actually experience the cold yourself.

In adolescence, children often become militant about
rejecting parental advice. They tend, however, to
overcompensate, rejecting all parental wisdom, which
often leads to its own set of problems. When Mom tells you to
wear a jacket, you refuse, mainly to assert your
autonomy. The weather outside, however, has its own
independent state, regardless of your power struggle inside.
Just because some parental advice is baseless and loony
doesn't mean all of it is.

The adolescent quest for self-regulation is a major factor
behind juvenile delinquency. Kids are rejecting the control
of their parents—as they are right to do—but
they don't yet have the systems in place for competent
self-control. This inevitably leads to clashes between
themselves, the laws of physics and the rules of society.

The adolescent isn't just trying to regulate hot and cold.
There are a thousand other systems he is learning to
control, including his sexuality, his schoolwork, his
relations with his peers and that pesky little problem of
what to do with his life. On most of these complex issues,
parental advice is usually useless, if not
counterproductive, but there isn't necessarily any better
advice to take its place.

It is not usually a matter of the adolescent not having
enough advice. Often, his bathed in it—advice from
parents, advice from peers, and advice and examples from the
mass media. Most of this advice is generic and isn't
appropriate to the kid's unique circumstances. The
adolescent will either reject this offered wisdom (if it
comes from his parents) or blindly accept it (if it comes
from, say, Nike or Coca-Cola). He is not yet skilled at
integrating portions of the outside advice with his
own independent observations and judgment. This requires a
suppression of ones ego to the point where the data can
taken on its own merits, independent of where it came from.
This faculty can takes years to develop.

The trouble with all advice is that it is theoretical, based
only only a limited number of simplistic variables: If it is
cold, then you need a jacket, says Mom. Real life involves
thousands of factors: how active you are, whether the
weather is windy or calm, humidity, precipitation, etc.
Perhaps, the only way to really know if you need a jacket is
to stick your head out the door. Then you can prepare for a
reasonable range of possible changes.

Advice about what you should do with your life is also
simplistic. For one thing, the person giving the advice is
far from unbiased. He has made his own investments, and his
advice to you is inevitably colored by them. Whatever it is
he has committed himself to, he expects you to follow.

You, however, are your own organism living in your own
universe, facing many factors that your advisors don't have
a clue about. Theory is only going to get you started.
Maybe it gets you through high school and into college. At
that point, you should start actually experimenting with life
rather than reading about it in books.

One shouldn't waste ones mind on too much formal education.
Book learnin' only goes so far. In one sense, academic
advice is way too complicated: You are forced to learn many
arcane facts that you'll never need in the real world. In
another sense, it misses the boat, failing to focus you on
the things that are really important.

Real life doesn't have this problem. Through the cattle
prod of reality, you get instant feedback on what you are
doing right and wrong. If you find there is something
important that you need to learn, then you can open a book
on your own. Book learnin', in this case, is much more
focussed and motivated than any artificial curriculum set up
for you in school.

All of life, we could say, is a struggle for
self-regulation. You want to be perfectly in sync with your
environment, your society, your body and your mind, and this
takes a lot of experimentation and careful observation. In
the beginning, we are clods, just barging through life based
on our own delusions and the dumb advice we have been given.
In later years, hopefully, we develop some subtlety and
grace, working with the flow of life rather than against it.

After that, of course, we end up dead, and all that experience
goes to waste. Therefore, it is important to attain wisdom
fairly quickly and not get yourself trapped into too many
dead ends. If you heed any advice, it should be this:

Life is an experiment, and you don't know what is going to
happen until you try it. You ought to approach it
tentatively, preserving your ability to change. The worst
thing you can do is claim that you have life all worked out
at the beginning. You don't have everything worked out and
probably never will, so you have to give yourself the
freedom and permission to take it as it comes.